Why slowing down feels threatening
There were several stretches in my manufacturing years where I worked twenty-some days in a row, many of them twelve-hour shifts, without a single day off. Our department was short-staffed and management said we were desperately behind on production, so overtime was mandatory at the company’s discretion. Children’s sporting events or school plays were not a good enough reason to be off. Doctor’s appointments had to be rescheduled. Family functions didn’t matter to them. If you showed any visible frustration about any of this, your annual review noted your attitude problem. The official line was always that the company cared deeply about work-life balance, yet the true reality was that the shifts had to be covered and your life outside the plant was your problem to manage around their production demands.
I was not alone in any of this, everyone I worked with was living some version of the same life. We complained to each other about the schedules in the way men complain to each other about things they have no intention of ever changing, with a kind of weary pride that we could take it. The ones who had been there longest wore their exhaustion like a credential. They had been doing this for twenty-five or thirty years, and they would do this for ten more, and the company would put their name on a plaque when they retired and then forget them within a month.
What I didn’t understand at the time, and what I have come to see clearly only since I left, is that the system we were all complaining about was working with us as much as it was working against us. The people who stayed in that plant for decades were not just enduring it, we were also using it. The relentless schedule, the constant pressure, the requirement to be available for twelve hours and then turn around and be available again, all of it had a hidden function inside our lives. It kept us from having to be alone with ourselves.
The physician and trauma guru Gabor Maté has spent his career writing about exactly this phenomenon. His book The Myth of Normal is one of the best things I have read about how modern Western culture produces sickness, both psychological and physical, through chronic stress and disconnection. His main argument is that the things we have been taught to call normal, including endless work and constant productivity and the expectation that we should be able to keep going indefinitely, are actually pathological adaptations to a culture that has lost contact with what human beings actually need. The fact that almost everyone around us is participating in the same pathology makes it invisible, which is exactly the problem.
Maté writes about how trauma operates in adult lives, and his observation is that most of the chronic illnesses, mental issues, and addictions in our culture are a result of childhood wounds that never had a chance to be felt, named, and integrated. The wounded child grows up, finds an adult world that rewards staying busy, and uses the staying busy to avoid feeling any of the wounds. The culture and the individual are in collusion. The culture says go faster; the individual says yes. Underneath the yes is an unspoken sentence the individual cannot quite hear: if I stop moving I will have to feel what is beneath all of this, and I am not ready for that. And so, they continue staying busy, stressed, and running from their childhood.
This is the part our culture won’t teach us. Think about how we talk about workaholism. We call it dedication, ambition, providing for the family, being a hard worker, being responsible. We don’t call it a trauma response, even though that is often what it is. The man who works seventy to eighty-four hours a week and never sees his children is admired for his strong work ethic, expected to retire comfortably, and praised for doing what a man is supposed to do. Nobody asks what he is running from. Nobody asks what would surface if he stopped. The asking would feel rude, because the framework we share treats his work as a virtue rather than as a symptom.
The same dynamic is true of the busy mother who never sits down, the entrepreneur who cannot stop checking his phone, the activist who has not had a real day off in years, the pastor who is on call for the congregation at every hour. The activities may look completely different, but the underlying function is often the same. The motion is a way of staying ahead of what is moving inside. And when someone in that pattern is finally offered the chance to slow down, what they often experience is threat rather than relief. The slowing reveals what the speed had been covering up all along.
I want to say what I think most of us in manufacturing knew on some level but would never have said out loud. A lot of us were running from something. Many of the men I worked with had grown up in homes where their feelings had been inconvenient, dangerous, or invisible. They had learned in childhood to manage themselves by staying useful and by not asking for anything. The plant was the adult version of that childhood arrangement. You showed up, you worked, you provided, you did not complain about your inner life because no one wanted to hear about it anyway, and at the end of the week there was a paycheck that proved you were a valuable member of society. The arrangement felt familiar yet exhausting. And that was a feature of the arrangement rather than a flaw in it, because exhaustion does not have the energy to ask any questions.
Maté is careful to point out that this pattern is not the fault of the individual. The culture is the water we are swimming in, and the water shapes us before we have any way to choose what we want to be shaped by. A child whose nervous system learned that being busy was the price of safety grows up into an adult who cannot stand it when there is nothing to do. The restlessness that shows up in the quiet moments is the body sending up a flare because the quiet is unfamiliar territory, and the body has been trained to treat unfamiliar territory as dangerous. Slowing down feels like a threat even when it would actually be a relief, because the body has not had enough practice with safety to know what safety feels like.
Our culture finishes what our childhoods started. The child who learned to suppress his feelings in order to be loveable grows up into an adult who suppresses his feelings in order to be employable. The systems that hire him are organized around his productivity rather than his wholeness. The mismatch between what he was trained to provide and what he actually needs to thrive is enormous, and the mismatch produces all of the chronic conditions Maté describes in his book, including the autoimmune disorders, the cardiovascular disease, the anxiety, the depression, and the addictions. These are the predictable results of a culture that demands more than a human nervous system was ever designed to provide.
The capacity that gets eroded by all of this is the one Elizabeth Stanley writes about in her book Widen the Window. She calls it interoceptive awareness, and she describes it as the ability to notice, tolerate, and accurately interpret the messages our bodies are sending through emotions and physical sensations. All three of those capacities have to be working together for the awareness to actually function. Interoception is what tells you when you are hungry, tired, scared, sad, angry, in pain, in love. It is the internal signal of your own experience, and it is what allows you to know what you actually need. When the culture trains you out of attending to those signals, you lose access to your own life. Stanley argues that mindfulness practice by itself is not enough to restore that access. Mindfulness alone can actually make things worse for people whose windows have already narrowed, because it increases awareness of the dysregulation without giving them tools to work with what they are now noticing. The path back involves something more than slowing down. It involves rebuilding the body’s capacity to be in honest contact with itself. You can keep moving for years without knowing whether you are happy, whether you are well, whether you are even still alive in any meaningful sense. The motion replaces the knowing. And once the motion has replaced the knowing, stopping the motion is the most threatening thing in the world, because stopping the motion is the only thing that would let the knowing come back.
This is why slowing down feels dangerous. The danger is the truth that the speed has been covering. The exhaustion you have been ignoring is going to surface. The grief you have been outrunning is going to catch up. The questions about what you actually want from your life are going to ask themselves the moment you give them room. For someone whose entire adult identity has been built on managing the speed, the prospect of letting the speed drop is the prospect of meeting a person they have been avoiding for decades.
The work of slowing down looks less like rest and more like grief. You start to feel the years of running. You feel how tired you actually are. You feel the wounds that the speed had numbed. You feel how much of your life you have spent on autopilot. None of this is comfortable. None of it is what the culture promises when it sells you mindfulness apps and weekend retreats. The slowing reveals the cost of the running, and the cost is heavier than most of us expected. This is also why the cost is worth paying. The slowing is the only thing that gives us back the inner life we lost when the running started.
I left my job in 2022 because I was chasing my dream of becoming a full-time counselor and something in me could not keep doing manufacturing anymore. The decision did not feel brave at the time, it felt necessary. What I did not anticipate was how hard the slowing down would be. The first months after I left, my body did not know what to do with the choices of how I might want to spend my time. I felt restless and anxious and faintly nauseated, like I had stepped off a treadmill that had been running so long my legs no longer remembered how to walk on solid ground. The exhaustion I had been outrunning for the past twenty-five years finally caught up with me, and it took years to move through it.
I am still doing that work. Slowing down has not been the gentle restorative experience the wellness industry advertised. It has been the slow excavation of a life I had not been living because I had been too busy producing. What I have found, in the slowing down, is a person I had only met briefly before. The version of me that sits underneath all of the motion is quieter and stranger and more interesting than the version that was running the plant floor. I am still getting to know him. He has things to say that I never had time to hear.
If you are reading this and you suspect that you are running from something, the fact that you are even able to notice that is a good sign. The culture trains us not to notice. The motion is supposed to be invisible. If part of you has started to wonder what you would feel if you slowed down, that part is telling you something important. The wondering itself is the inner life finally getting through. It is asking you to notice that the slowness is the only door that opens up what has been waiting. The wondering does not require you to quit your job tomorrow. It only asks that you not silence it again the way you have so many times before.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Borrowed Authority and the Cost of Outsourcing Trust
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
